Getting into factories. This really helped! How I learned to test my Rails applications, Part 3: Model specs

I won’t spend a lot of time bad-mouthing fixtures—frankly, it’s already been done. Long story short, there are two issues presented by fixtures I’d like to avoid: First, fixture data can be brittle and easily broken (meaning you spend about as much time maintaining your test data as you do your tests and actual code); and second, Rails bypasses Active Record when it loads fixture data into your test database. What does that mean? It means that important things like your models’ validations are ignored. This is bad!